Why sometimes it’s rude not to interrupt

To communicate your ideas you need to understand what people expect from the conversation. There are conversations that ask for much courtesy, and others where interrupting is not just tolerated, but expected.

You probably know someone who talks a lot, who interrupts all the time and will literally speak right over you, who always has an anecdote about themselves at the ready, and who on top of it all, talks super loud and very fast.

I hope you like that person, because I just described myself.

These habits reflect my preferences as an individual, but they’re also related to my cultural context, and to the expectations that come with different situations (social, academic, professional, etc.). Obviously, not everyone shares my preferences or my context. Communication is extremely personal, and if you’ve ever tried to win someone over to your way of thinking, you have probably encountered differences between their preferences and yours.

This can be a great obstacle to communicate and persuade others of the value of your ideas. Recognizing these preferences and adapting to them is key to get people to understand what you are talking about and support you.
Conversational styles

The linguist Deborah Tannen has dedicated her carreer to study different people’s interaction styles, and she established a spectrum of styles, ranging from high consideration to high involvement. These styles determine all kinds of things, from the speed and volume of the conversation, to the type of questions asked, how the turn of speech is shared, and whether interrupting is unacceptable, allowed, or even expected.

Play ball

The friendliest way to explain Tannen’s spectrum is with sport analogies. They have been used since the 80s to acclimatize foreign language students to the conversational style of the culture they are studying, but they are also useful in understanding conversational styles in other contexts.

In this analogy, possession of the ball represents turn of speech, the techniques of the game, conversational strategies, and their intensity in general, the intensity of the interaction.

Bowling. This is the typical conversation style of East Asian cultures. It is formal and very structured. Like when you bowl, the order in which speakers rotate turns is fixed and predetermined. Whatever happens in the game does not change this order. Therefore, there are no strategies to pass or snatch a turn, and interruptions are viewed negatively.

Basketball. This is the style of countries like the United States or Canada. It is not a contact sport, so the intensity is not too high, but it is a fast-paced game, bursting with strategies to keep, pass or steal the ball — the turn of speech. In the conversation, this means using phrases like “what I mean by that is…” to hold on to your turn once you finished your comment, and ask questions of a particular person to pass the turn to them (and not anyone else).

Rugby. This is the style of Latin America, southern Europe, and the Middle East. It is a fast and free contact sport. If you are not trying to steal the ball, you’re not really even playing. Interruptions abound in the conversation, like tackles in the game, and experienced players know how to defend against them. In this style, a person can ignore a sudden question, or answer it in a tangent without losing the thread of their conversation.

These three analogies only represent three points of the spectrum between high consideration (bowling) and high involvement (rugby). They constitute the two extremes and one point, that corresponds to the most commonly used second language. To describe other parts of the spectrum, we could say, for example, that Germans and Brits play conversational tennis or perhaps volleyball.

Finally, although this analogy is associated with intercultural communication, within each there is still culture there are people who play more one of these speech sports than others, and contexts where one is appropriate and the other is not. Interaction is always sensitive to the situation in which it happens.

Now that you understand your own conversational style, and those you usually interact with, you might and want to know how to soften or prevent friction. We’ll cover this in part 2 of this series.

And if you want to know how this affects your interaction with your clients, colleagues, supervisors, subordinates, etc., wait for part 3.